The present disclosure relates to a method and system for automatically suggesting responses based on social conversational content in customer care services.
Smart phones and social media sites, such as, Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and Google Plus, etc., amplify customers' voice in the marketplace. Customers can research companies online, seek recommendations through social media channels, and share opinions about their experiences with certain companies, products and services. Their activity on these sites can affect a company's reputation. Because social media is not as widely moderated as mainstream media, negative postings by individuals can adversely impact others' perceptions of a company. The impact on a brand or company can be far-reaching due to the viral spread of information via social communities connected online. Therefore, companies desire an access to these social conversations and participation in the dialogue as part of their social customer relationship management (CRM) model.
CRM is used to manage a company's interactions with customers, clients, and sales prospects through social media channels. CRM uses technology to organize, automate, and synchronize business processes—principally sales activities—marketing, customer service, and technical support. The overall goals are to find, attract, and earn new clients, nurture and retain existing clients, entice a return of former clients, and reduce the marketing and servicing costs to clients. CRM delivers customer business data to help companies provide customers with desired products and services, provide better customer service, cross-sell and up sell more effectively, and close deals.
A typical CRM model monitors social media posts made about a select product or service, select topics, customer sentiment, user profile, and influence. The posts are collected and forwarded to a customer care query handling expert, which resolves any customer's issue by answering queries based on its knowledge and experience. Because social media is a growing platform, dominated by conversational, transparent and instant interactions among a network of connected customers, companies are challenged to effectively provide customers with instant and accurate solutions.
Therefore, the handling expert must be adept at identifying, analyzing, and solving the customers' problem. The conventional approach is a manual process requiring intensive expert training, so handling experts have different degrees of knowledge. Some experts refer to documentation or senior agents before responding to queries, increasing the response time, which can lead to frustrated and dissatisfied customers.
In a traditional (telephonic) call center environment, service logs automatically generate and/or recommend responses by categorizing verbal-to-textual content in the customer's conversation. However, the service logs do not address social medial contexts presented in an online environment, such as customer locations based on customer profiles, geo-code check-ins, historical conversations with regards to topics, sentiments, and dialog sequence structure, etc. Furthermore, as compared with traditional call-center systems, social contents are more noisy, informal, and conversational in the CRM environment.
A desired CRM approach targets contextual information presented by social conversations to assist an agent's response.